Michael Crick writes: Unite campaign pretty dismal so far?

To
listen to many Conservatives, and even some Blairite Labour people,
you’d think the House of Commons was about to fall prey to a bunch of
red-blooded, hard-left, McCluskeyite, Labour MPs controlled by the trade union Unite.In May, the then political director of
Unite, Steve Hart, wrote a paper in which he listed 41 parliamentary
seats in which Unite hoped to get named people elected. This list has
been much quoted in the press, and included Falkirk, the scene of the
recent row about Unite’s tactics.

So, just two months on, how is the Unite campaign going, given that
it was blessed with all the union’s organisational skills, money, and
critics allege, willingness to break the rules?

Er, not very well, so far.

Of the 41 seats, 22 of them have now picked Labour candidates. And
in 13 of the 22 seats, the Unite person named in Steve Hart’s report,
failed to get selected.

True, Unite did get nine of its names chosen. But that’s a strike
rate of just under 41 per cent, which doesn’t seem that impressive to
me.

According to my enquiries, none of those nine names is an especially
left-wing figure. None is anything like as left-wing as the Unite leader
Len McCluskey. None seems to be a likely recruit to the socialist
Campaign Group of MPs.

Chris Matheson in Chester, for example, doesn’t strike me as a
hard-line McCluskeyite. On the contrary he used to work for Ken
Jackson, the right-wing leader of the engineering union before it
amalgamated with the TGWU to form Unite.

Mike O’Brien and Rob Marris are both former MPs for the seats which
they are now fighting again. Neither had a revolutionary past at
Westminster. Mr O’Brien, a former Solicitor-General, hardly strikes me
as the sort to take orders from Len McCluskey.

Now it’s possible that one or two left-wingers will be picked from
the remaining 19 names on Unite’s list. But if they are, it will be
just a handful, they will hardly threaten the Labour establishment.
Some of the remaining names, for example, are people who’ve stood for
internal Labour elections on the slate of the Blairite group Progress.

Any Unite member expecting the union’s efforts to bring a great
phalanx of left-wingers into Parliament is likely to be sorely
disappointed.

Indeed, if I was a Unite member, given all the effort and support
which the union claims to be giving these candidates, I’d want to
question Len McCluskey as to why his strike rate is so poor. Is it
really worth it?
Written by Michael Crick. Follow @MichaelLCrick on Twitter

Dearunite.com adds:

Rob Marris ex MP “Voted very strongly for the Iraq war.
Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war”. He
even looks like a Tory: